The biggest question about the internet is whether it really is a subversive technology - ie one which undermines the established social, political and economic order and brings about revolutionary change.

Is it like print, in other words? Or just an innovation, like television, that can be brought to heel by the powers that be?

In the early days of the net, most geeks (this columnist included) had no doubts on that score: the network would, in due course, change everything.

Indeed, one of us - the Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow - even wrote a 'Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace'.

Barlow's Declaration was written in 1996. 'Governments of the Industrial World', it begins, 'you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

'On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.

'You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather...

'I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.

'You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear...'

Stirring stuff, eh? There is a lot more in the same vein. I was pondering it last week as news came in about the latest exploits of the copyright thugs.

Some 150 Danish users of KaZaA and eDonkey file-sharing services have received invoices for up to $14,000 apiece from an anti-piracy trade organisation in respect of downloaded copyright material.

If the recipients pay immediately then the amount will be reduced by half and the alleged offenders avoid going to court. Those who don't pay up will be sued.

How is this possible? Simple: the trade organisation monitored the file-sharing networks for available files with Danish IP addresses - and went to court to get the users' personal details from their ISPs.

The courts obliged and ordered the ISPs to deliver the personal details of the incriminated users. QED.

So much for Barlow's assertion that there were no 'methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear'. The truth is that the established order has ample means at its disposal for quashing manifestations of the unruly forces of Cyberspace.

But digital subversives need not reach for the cyanide capsules just yet, for there are plausible reasons for believing that just because the powers-that-be have won this battle does not mean that they will win the war.

For example, a group of researchers at - wait for it - Microsoft recently presented an interesting paper at an academic computing conference. Its title was 'The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution' and it presents the best analysis I have seen of the prospects for successful 'digital rights management' systems.

The authors' conclusions make grim reading for the content industries. 'We speculate,' they say, 'that there will be short-term impediments to the effectiveness of the darknet [existing file-sharing systems] as a distribution mechanism, but ultimately the darknet-genie will not be put back in the bottle.'

Spot on. The only way to extinguish subversive computer technology is to make programming a capital offence, and even the US Congress might balk at that. The Microsoft researchers correctly predict that 'the darknet will continue to exist and provide low cost, high-quality service to a large group of consumers'.

There aren't enough lawyers in the world to stamp out file-sharing.

The only sensible survival strategy for content owners, therefore, is to provide a service which, as it were, out-Napsters Napster.

Or, as the Microsoft boys put it: 'If you are competing with the darknet, you must compete on the darknet's own terms: convenience and low cost rather than additional security.'

Will the record companies and movie studios get this message? Is the Pope a Buddhist?